Virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR HMDs) are attracting users by offering the potential of full sensory immersion in virtual environments. In order to create the illusion of fill immersion, a near-eye display of a VR HMD requires very heavy image processing and image rendering workloads. Low latency, high framerate, and high visual quality are all needed. Tethered virtual reality (VR) setups in which the head-mounted displays (HMD) is bound to a powerful gaming desktop provide limited mobility and exploration, and are difficult to deploy widely. Current untethered mobile products are intended to offer a user a realistic mobile VR experience, but their graphic processing units (GPUs) are too power-constrained to produce an acceptable framerate and latency, even for scenes of modest visual quality.